lapel rolls
Published: Thursday, March 6th 2008
Bespoke garments are about different things for different customers, and the roll of a jacket lapel is just one of these examples.
Some clients like a very relaxed look to the jacket combined with soft lazy full lapels, ( the lapels with all the fullness showing down the lapel edge ) personally, they are not my cup of tea, but if requested the client is king.
Other clients of mine like a lapel to be sharp and very clean with a good strong roll, I must admit this is my preference, even though it is much harder to achieve and get good results.
The picture below shows the starting of one of these jackets with a good strong roll, and when fully finished the jacket will have a lovely, classy lapel roll.
I have hand padded ( hand stitched ) the lapel portion of the jacket, at the same time as placing the stitches I have created the roll you can see here. The lapel is automatically sitting up off the table and wanting to turn over to its correct finished position without me having to manually hold it in position.
The next picture shows another angle of the above lapel, there are no basting cottons holding this lapel in place, just the hand padding stitches.
The chalk line you can see going up to the shoulder area of the jacket is the line the turn of the finished lapel will take, the crease edge of the lapel in other words.
The next picture shows a section of the right lapel which I have hand stitched to create the shape to the lapel pictured above.
Because this is a 'fresco' cloth I have used a slightly heavier canvas for the jacket. The differences between this particular canvas and my best quality soft canvas is virtually indistinguishable to the touch or the wearer.
The next picture shows the lapel roll of a jacket I was in the process of finishing. The jacket lapel pictured here is the Porter and Harding jacket fitting pictured on my client in the weblog entry below this one under the title " who says shorter people should not wear large checked patterns"
You can see on this picture the lovely strong clean roll to the lapel, this picture was taken with the camera placed on the cloth flat, so this an eye level shot.
This cloth is 16-18oz, I cant remember the actual weight, so it does lend itself well to a great roll anyway.
The next picture shows where I started from with the lapel pictured above.
The picture below shows the right front side of the jacket BEFORE I have started to pad the lapel ( hand stitch ) the lapel is just flat and lifeless.
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